David Burchell, writing in The Australian, takes Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown to task for their bout of “windy semonising” at St Paul’s Cathedral during the G20 Summit:

When Rudd crafted a word-picture of modern society torn between rival and incompatible doctrines - one of Friedrich von Hayek-style naked greed, the other on the model of Christian kindness - he revealed a striking lack of interest in the ethics of politics, as opposed to the transcendental morality of the churches. By the same token, when Brown spoke to the assembled prelates at St Paul's about the need for the West to rediscover its moral compass… he revealed only the capacity of windy moralism to obscure the most troubling facts about our economic predicament.

Mutuality à la Adam Smith, not economics based on Christian benevolence or moralising from on high, suggests Burchell, is the way out of the GFC maze.

Regardless of the value of his economic argument, however, in this entertaining article Burchell has some interesting side-swipes at the churches - which today “not uncommonly occupy what we might call an ethical niche-market, with a speciality in the rhetoric of moral reproach.”